Stephen Fry—British writer, actor, and geek extraordinaire—recently wrote of the iPad, “One melancholy thought occurs as my fingers glide and flow over the surface of this astonishing object: Douglas Adams is not alive to see the closest thing to his Hitchhiker’s Guide that humankind has yet devised.”

That is a sad fact indeed; apps like Articles and Wikipanion have essentially made The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy a reality, and Douglas Adams, who died in 2001, missed seeing the fantastic mesh of software, hardware, and network that made his dream real by only a few years.

Human ingenuity being what it is, though, the capabilities of the iPhone and the iPad have already begun to overtake the capabilities of The Hitchhiker’s Guide, and WolframAlpha is a great example of that. Today we’ll be looking at how this knowledge and functionality is packed into a simple iPhone app.